Out of the Pandemic: a Secure Regional Food Supply System

Opportunities lurk in every downturn. To recover and move forward, we must do more than scramble back to the past, we must ferret out and explore better and more secure… Read More

Key Vermont Leadership Questions

I. As a leader, how do you plan to inspire, earn, and maintain trust? II. Are the innate characteristics of leadership power, authority, self- assurance, and clarity or humility, curiosity,… Read More

Nonprofit Leadership and Governance

The Vermont Nonprofit sector is a major contributor to Vermont’s economy and to the well-being of Vermonters. Its 6000 organizations represent about 20% of Vermont’s overall economy and employ about… Read More

Volleyball anyone?

On VPR’s Vermont Edition show Friday, January 31st, Governor Scott, responding to a barrage of listener and interviewer questions about how he will address Vermont’s challenges, kept answering with “show… Read More

Vermont Needs a Four-Year Leadership Term

It’s time for my decennial screed against Vermont’s two-year term for executive and legislative branches. I’ve watched the damage done by this narrow horizon play out for the 50 years… Read More

Vermont’s Remote Worker Grant Program

The Vermont State Auditor’s recent report entitled “Structural Weaknesses and Questionable Gains by Vermont’s Remote Worker Grant Program” not only raises questions about the design and efficacy of the executive… Read More

Winter Driving in Vermont

I was hurt. I always thought of him as my friend. He couldn’t stop laughing long enough to utter a word. Evidently I had said something funny when I called… Read More

Leaders or Politicians?

It would appear that the new leader of Vermont’s largest agency ($2.5B), the Agency of Human Services, was chosen more for his political affiliation than his human services leadership experience… Read More

Can Vermont Lose Weight?

As someone who’s weighed just shy of 500 pounds and now weighs 200 pounds less, I’m comfortable talking about weight loss. It’s often said that Vermont has an “affordability problem,”… Read More

Our Natural Capital

The Stick is Failing Us, Let’s Try the Carrot. Under the current administration we’re regressing into old but persistent racial and xenophobic resentments that, under great and unifying leaders, lie… Read More

Vermont’s Motto: Freedom and Unity

“Freedom and Unity” is Vermont’s motto and has been since 1788. It expresses the unattainable equipoise between freedom of the individual and the shared well-being of the community in which… Read More

Vermont: Economic Development

VTDigger: Schubart column  Vermont has no long-term, well-articulated economic development strategy nor the funding capacity to execute one. It’s not that we don’t spend money on economic development. There are… Read More